


Rehabilitation

by Quiet_Shadow



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Animated (2007)
Genre: Body Horror, Chronic Pain, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Painkillers, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-29 22:07:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12094455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quiet_Shadow/pseuds/Quiet_Shadow
Summary: Captured by the Autobots, Megatron becomes the lead subject in the Acting Magnus' pet project, slowly being broken down in frame and Spark, stripped of everything that makes him a Warlord, everything that makes him a Decepticon...





	Rehabilitation

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the 'TFA Lost Light AU' tags on Tumblr (you should get a look at them if you haven't yet), I wrote this little fic last year, posted it on Tumblr and forgot to cross-post it anywhere else.  
> Correcting that mistake now.

Everything hurts.

Not that he will admit it aloud -- and never mind if he does, because he knows those medics, those scientists who watch him with cold, clinical optics -- those butchers who parades before him, solar cycle after solar cycle, taking notes, making tests, nodding in self-satisfaction -- know he’s in pain, and they won’t raise a servo to help him. Not if he doesn’t come to them first, come to them with bright blue -- blue! They dared to take even that away! -- optics and a strained smile, politely asking for his daily dose, double dose, triple dose depending on how he felt.

He doesn’t, not if he can avoid it, and avoid it he can at the price of a slow, steady increase of pain, of a burning sensation through his Spark, or an itch under his plating where his protoform got scarred and over-scarred to the point he’s not sure he even has working sensors anymore and isn’t just feeling phantom pain. He grinds his dental plates -- flat, so flat now, they took away his fangs among the first things they judged ‘good’ to be removed -- and bears it.

And bears it.

And bears it, until finally it’s not bearable anymore and he has to cave in, lest he become crazed from the pain or end up as a sobbing mess. He wishes they’d kill him before they reduce him to the wreck he’s devolving into whenever the pain gets the better of him. He wishes he can stop them from toying with him the way they do. He wishes he can escape their clutches, even if it means falling into oblivion.

Running fast and hard against the wall, hitting his helm again and again against the reinforced steel until something breaks -- until his CPU breaks -- would be so easy… But the sad truth is, he can’t. The Autobots have made sure he can’t. His systems, his newly installed, foreign protocols won’t allow him to self-destruct. To sink into apathy, most certainly, but not to consider self-harm and even less so, termination.

It’s a surprise, and it’s not one at the same time. Of course they won’t allow him to die -- not him, not their ‘pet project’, not when they invested so much in his ‘rehabilitation’. You can’t run a good propaganda program if your number one test subject commits suicide before you’re through. They want to break him, to make him beg. And beg he does, against his better wishes, because he needs it, needs his body to be something else but one massive injury. He needs the painkillers, the suppressors, if he wants to be able to even think coherently after a while. They know it, he knows it. His resistance is futile at the most, because there is only one possible issue in his short to mid-timed resistance.

But even then, they’ll make him go through another battery of tests, another rows of questions, make him do his daily ‘exercises’ as to not slow his ‘recovery program’ before they relent and hand him the precious blockers. Megatron suspects, no, he **knows** they get a kick out of watching him suffer, and the few who don’t (not that Megatron don’t hate them any less than the bigger monsters) are powerless or unwilling to help. What he wouldn’t wish to be able to crush their helmets between his hands, like he did when he was at his prime.

But he’s not, not anymore, not with the way they slowly but meticulously sapped everything that made him a warlord, everything that made him him, everything that made him Megatron, and everything that made him a Decepticon.

At least, in theory.

The Autobots are certainly trying their best.

The pain is his mistress and his teacher, the subtle and not-so-subtle reminder that he’s trapped, that his body isn’t his anymore, that his processors aren’t his anymore. Not fully. The strain he’s living through his enormous, and he’s only one mech. One mech against the whole Ministry of Sciences, and against the Elite Guard and its condescending, twisted moral.

It doesn’t matter if he resists. It doesn’t matter if he tries not to give in to the pain and ask for the painkillers, because sooner or later, he will. And if he waits too long, if he lets the pain overcome him, they’ll use it to their advantage.

They’ll just watch as his processors and circuitries briefly short out and glitch from the agony, and then they’ll strap him down to a medical berth and plunge into his systems and his medical ports and allow him to finally get the relief he needs. And all the while, they’ll be leaning over him, chiding him as if he was some kind of misbehaving, newly ensparked protoform who really should know better, and they will remove his helmet to reveal the delicate circuitry of his CPU and start digging cables and needles inside so they can ‘try and fix him further’. And he’ll be able to feel every tweaks they do to his systems, see every strand of coding they poke at displayed on his HUD, and shakes and howls in rage and fear and pain as they curb his warrior coding, upload new programs to cripple his fighting instincts, dig holes in his battle protocols, toys with his loyalty subroutines.

After the first three times -- those two terrifying, frighteningly insightful and traumatizing times -- Megatron knows better than to let things devolve to that point, but he’d damn himself to the Pit if he just gives up and stops all form of resistance, no matter how passive or silly or plain dangerous it is. And so he lets himself suffer, until he knows he can’t take it anymore without fritzing yet again, and his face is a mask of utter desolation and pain as he kneels to the floor, hands in his lap and just beg, beg, beg for their help, for the painkillers to numb the pain receptors in his maimed frame, for the sweet relief of inhibitors to sooth the aching of his mutilated Spark.

Because capturing him, imprisoning him deep in the bowels of Trypticon, his own fortress once upon a time, wasn’t humiliating enough, no. Megatron had expected to be executed, his death broadcasted across all Autobot-controlled universe for the masses to witness, for his Decepticons to pirate and assist to, helpless. To show the world at large the Decepticons aren’t a threat anymore.

They didn’t kill him, and won’t. But what they’re doing to them is far, far worse.

Under scalpels and needles, under false soothing words and insults, under the hands of scientists, surgeons, medics, medical drones, he’s slowly being transformed into something else. Not someone else, not quite, but he’s not… He’s **different** , and he knows it, and it burns, the knowledge there is no going back to what he was burns in his CPU as much as his broken body throbs in pain under the thin but fancy-looking plating they ‘granted’ him the use of.

He has heard they had wanted to reshell him at first; obviously, they thought better of it. Instead of a simple reframe, the Autobots went further, surgically modifying him, cutting away the ‘unnecessary parts’, making sure there would be no undoing their work.

His fangs have given way to flat dental plates. His claws have been cut, leaving being blunt -- too blunt -- digits; he can’t even scratch his protoform when he buries them in his wrists when the pain is high or he tries to restrain his anger. They dug into his protoform, like the butchers they are, to excise as much mass as they could to bring him to ‘normal, acceptable Autobot-sized proportions’. It makes him internally shudders. The reshelling would have been easier -- possible -- to reverse, and he could have endured it gracefully.

Or perhaps not. Megatron has seen the empty frames displayed in one lab, waiting for a Spark -- his, once upon a time, before different orders were given. Most of them were feminine in nature, simple and bare from kibbles to give them personality and uniqueness. He isn’t blind to the way the big-chinned mech, this ‘Sentinel’ who appropriated the term of ‘Acting Magnus’, watches those frames when he passes them by. And he isn’t blind about the way the mech watches Megatron himself, little self-satisfied smirk on his face, a self-satisfied smirk which reminds Megatron too much of Starscream.

Yes, perhaps agonizing surgery was the better option, even if it means having his body permanently downsized. At least it’s still his, somewhat, someway. Even if he’s more scars than protoform underneath plating. Even if they took so much mass out of him he can’t believe his frame is working at all.

But even that is delicate work, unperfect work; his limbs feel wrong, out of proportions, his legs and arms too long and too thin for his torso, his hips, his chest. He easily stumbles, knocks asides what he is trying to grab. His vision, his depth perception are adapting too slowly to the changes in his body. His knees are stiff, his ankles feeble. Small mercy, two nurses regularly come to massage them before and after each ‘re education’ session, carefully taking note of his progresses as he’s forced to walk the room long and large, gripping awkwardly at the metal bars along the walls that allow him to keep standing. They mutter encouragements and praises, which Megatron finds as false as their smiles, but he doesn’t chase them. He can’t. As humiliating as it is, he relies too much on their care to allow himself to push them away. He’s stubborn, but he isn’t stupid; as thin as his chances of escaping the Autobots’ clutches are, he won’t be able to if he can’t run, even less if he can’t even walk. If only he could transform… but even his T-Cog, this precious component that allows every member of their species to transform, has been taken out of him in the earliest surgeries.

Scalpels and bistouries and lasers leaves their marks deep into his body, damaging the sensors they didn’t see fit to remove at the edge of the incisions. Most manages to repair themselves overtime. The rest… well, there is a reason he feels constant pain. But the physical pain of his body is nothing next to the pain in his Spark.

For his frame is hardly the only thing the Autobots turns their attention to. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised; he had already known the depth of their depravity in order to fill their needs. Still, what they have done come as a painful, awful surprise.

Little pieces by little pieces, just a tiny bit at time as not to accidentally destabilize the whole Spark and accidentally kill him, they reduce the size of his Spark in order for it to better fit with his new body. He doesn’t need such a big Spark, such unneeded energy in order to move his frame around. Plus, a smaller Spark, size-adapted to his current body, ensure there won’t be a shell-rejection -- at least in theory.

Megatron curses and shoots and thrashes and screams -- but he doesn’t beg, no, not quite -- whenever they come and get him for yet another Spark surgery, when they strap in down on a medical berth and part his chestplates as if the locks on them don’t exist. They might as well not be, for all the good they do him; medics and scientists and guards alike can access them, open them, discard them, and this is something terrifying on a level refuses to contemplate as he’s put under, knowing he’ll wake up to find himself further hobbled, further maimed.

Each missing fragment taken from his core is a blow he isn’t likely to recover, as much as he wishes -- and secretly, fervently prays -- to. Spark surgery is a delicate matter, and quite irreversible. A Spark can be reduced to fit in a more fuel-efficient frame, something the Autobots seem quite fond of, especially since the so-called end of the War. To Megatron, it isn’t, it never was the end; merely a setback, until he has gathered his forces to launch another assault which will bring him victory. Or it was, until recently.

The irony of his Spark being cut away bit by bit in as many fragments, after he has spend so much time on Earth trying to gather those of the Allspark isn’t lost on him, and if he doesn’t chuckle bitterly, it’s a near thing.

His maimed Spark give another pang, and he grits his dental plates to not groan, not to let them know how close he is to cave in and ask for chemical relief. He won’t give them that pleasure just yet. Not so long there is enough strength and will in him still to push the issues away, even if only for a few more megacycles. So he bears it, he avoids looking at the cameras following his every moves in this minuscule cell they see fit to lock him in when they don’t ‘work at his rehabilitation’, and just focus his optics on the servos he keeps complacently in his lap.

For all their talks, for all their supposed ‘morality’, the Autobots can show themselves far crueler than Megatron himself can be. At least his cruelty has a point; Autobots’ own doesn’t serve any, except to flatter their ego and convince themselves of their superiority, to reassure themselves warbuilds aren’t a danger to them anymore, that they can be ‘converted’ into good little Autobots, ‘tamed’ into ‘working, respectable members of the society’. 

That the Decepticons don’t want to be converted and won’t be without a fight, they couldn’t care less about, so long they get what they want and can show it to the public.

And what better show to give the masses than the spectacle of a ‘reformed’ Megatron, standing at the elbow of the Magnus, watchful, calm, smiling and swearing his loyalty to the Autobots Commonwealth?

It makes him want to purge. Actually, it has made him purge several times already. His frame shakes -- in rage, in indignation, in despair, in pain, he’s not sure anymore. There is a long way to go before he’s ready to be shown to the public, he knows it. The guards and the scientists alike are hardly discreet when they chat -- and indeed, they often talk about him over his helm as if he isn’t here, as if he can’t understand them. The medics are usually more subdued, but even they talk between themselves, of his progresses, of his lack of progresses, of the long series of interventions they still need to go through.

They’re going to cut him open again, to cut off his protoform and Spark again. Right now, he’s about as tall as Ultra Magnus was, perhaps a little smaller. But the Acting Magnus, well, he wants more. He wants smaller. He wants to be able to watch Megatron in the optics without raising his head -- or even better, he wants Megatron to be the one to raise his head in order to look at him. So smaller still Megatron will get.

His programming is still too wild, too dangerous; they won’t release him at large until they’re sure he isn’t a menace anymore, can’t fight anymore -- it’s unsure if they’ll consider letting him retaliate in self-defense yet, but Megatron thinks not; that’d be too dangerous for his ‘fellow Cybertronian’. He’s also still too dependent on painkillers yet; over time, they will diminish the doses, until they won’t give him anymore at all, even if the burning, the aching won’t never go.

He’s not ‘functional’ yet.

And hands in his lap, waiting, venting slowly to hide his pain, Megatron wonders when he’ll ever be in the Autobots’ optics.

 

****

End


End file.
